illustrated portrait of English poet and author Geoffrey Chaucer

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The Masculine Narrator and Four Women of Style

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SOURCE: “The Masculine Narrator and Four Women of Style,” in Speaking of Chaucer, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1970, pp. 46-64.

[In the following essay, Donaldson examines the way in which Chaucer “simultaneously” describes events from a number of different viewpoints while apparently seeing them from a singular point of view. In particular, Donaldson focuses on four of the women who become the object of the narrator's discussion: Emily (“The Knight's Tale”), May (“The Merchant's Tale”), Criseyde (Troilus and Criseyde), and the Prioress (“The Prioress's Tale”).]

Not long ago an American Chaucerian harshly reprimanded those modern critics who talk about Chaucer as if he had a complicated or difficult style such as Donne's or Pope's. Chaucer, Professor Bronson asserts, was ‘a poet who deliberately practised a style capable of being instantly followed by a moderately attentive ear, and who seems to have had a genuine liking for russet yeas and honest kersey noes’1 Therefore those who go digging in the poet's works with highly sophisticated tools, searching for buried subtleties, are guilty of the worst kind of critical vanity, which is to make what is really easy seem hard.

I have much sympathy for this point of view, despite the fact that a critical term I once used in connection with Chaucer seems to have provided one of the principal impulses for Professor Bronson's attack.2 Chaucer does indeed have a simple, readily understandable style. Any poet who, near the beginning of a narrative about a trip to Canterbury, can expend eight laborious lines in order to inform us that, while he has time and space, before he goes any further in the story, he thinks it in accordance with reason to tell us all the condition of each of the people he met—according to the way it seemed to him, that is—and which they were, and of what degree, and also in what array that they were in, and finally announces that he will begin with a knight, and then climaxes this prospectus with the triumphant statement that there was a knight—well, such a poet is obviously so dedicated to the proposition that poetry should be understood that he might almost be said to have cornered the market in russet and kersey. Nevertheless, I do not think that this is all that can be said of his style—that this is an end to it; if it were, I suspect that a few more sentences like the one I have just paraphrased (which is actually a self-parody) would have brought an end to most readers' acquaintance with his works, and that no Chaucer criticism would ever have grown to irritate Professor Bronson with its rank blossoms. In this paper I should like to investigate some passages in which a style that seems so simple and comprehensible is able to achieve effects that deserve a rather richer comparison than russet or kersey.

I shall concentrate on a single kind of effect—Chaucer's ability to describe things simultaneously from several distinct points of view while seeming to see them from only one point of view, and thus to show in all honesty the complexity of things while preserving the appearance of that stylistic simplicity which we feel to be so honest and trustworthy. The particular objects of his regard that I shall discuss are women—four attractive women, to be exact. I choose women because they are, obviously, the most complex topic that a man can try to deal with, a subject that no honest poet can hope to treat simply. An attractive woman requires even more complex handling, for she is likely to provoke in a man certain emotional responses that become, in any fiction, a part of her reality. That is why male narrators in literature so often fall in love with their heroines—to encourage the reader also to make an emotional investment from which he will expect, though not necessarily get, a return. Almost always with attractive women there is an element of deception—in literature, that is. A heroine fails to live up to the high ideals which a romantic male assumes to be a necessary corollary of her beauty, and thereby deceives him, or, more accurately, undeceives him, which is worse. Or else her charm is such—‘so absolute she seems, and in herself complete’—that his idea of what is right becomes unhinged, as happened to poor Adam. Or if she does live up to the male's romantic expectation, she may well cease to be a woman at all, and elude him by becoming a symbol or a cypher. In Chaucer's description of the four women I have chosen to talk about he has, with absolute honesty, brought it about that careful readers—those with attentive ears—may perceive potentials that he himself seems not to see, preoccupied as he is with the ladies' outward beauty. The ladies are Emily, the symbolic heroine of the “Knight's Tale,” May, the downright deceitful heroine of the “Merchant's Tale”; Criseide, the disappointing heroine of Troilus; and the Prioress, a romance heroine masquerading as a nun.

Let us begin with Emily, who is from the human point of view one of the least interesting and hence least Chaucerian of Chaucer's heroines, though as an artistic creation she is splendid. Readers are so often disappointed by Emily because she has no character, and they are apt to blame Chaucer for not having given her any, failing to observe how very hard he has worked, in his simple-minded way, to see that she has none: for symbols such as Emily do not act, they merely are. We first meet her as she walks in the garden beneath the grim tower in which Palamon and Arcite are imprisoned:

… It fil ones in a morwe of May
That Emelye, that fairer was to seene
Than is the lilye upon his stalke greene,
And fressher than the May with flowres newe—
For with the rose colour stroof hir hewe:
I noot which was the fairer of hem two—
Er it were day, as was hir wone to do,
She was arisen and al redy dight,
For May wol have no slogardye anight:
The seson priketh every gentil herte,
And maketh it out of his sleep to sterte,
And saith, ‘Aris and do thyn observaunce.’
This maketh Emelye have remembraunce
To doon honour to May and for to rise.
Yclothed was she fresshe to devise;
Hir yelow heer was broided in a tresse
Bihinde hir bak a yerde long, I gesse,
And in the gardin at the sonne upriste
She walketh up and down, and as hire liste
She gadreth flowres party white and rede
To make a subtil gerland for hir hede,
And as an angel hevenisshly she soong.

(A1034-55)

Despite a measure of grammatical confusion which the modern editor is hard put to straighten out by dashes or parentheses, the style of the passage is simple enough, and the meaning is wholly clear: Emily is a pretty, long-haired blonde with a good complexion and an excellent singing voice. Yet while this information occupies four lines, the Knight has taken twenty-two to weave his tapestry. If we unravel the threads, we shall find that Emily is a good deal more—if a good deal less—than a woman. Not only is she like the May flowers that she is gathering, but she is also vying with them in beauty; and the fact is, of course, that she is herself a May flower which the warm sunrise of May wakes and causes to take its natural position in the garden of Spring. The poet seems to be trying to describe a woman, but he is actually showing us something of a rather different order. May, May, May, May; lily, stalk, flowers, garden, flowers, garland; green, rose, yellow, white, red; morning, day, sunrise: all the best of nature in the Spring, and all part of Emily, or rather, through the poet's intricate craft, of these things is Emily all compact. She becomes not only the embodiment of all pretty young girls in the Spring, but a proof that the Spring of pretty young girls is a permanent thing, and that May in their persons will always warm the masculine heart as May warms their hearts and sends them out among the flowers: ‘Up rose the sun, and up rose Emily’. Like so many of Chaucer's narrators when they are describing attractive women, the aging Knight twice brings himself into the description as if he were himself trying to share more intimately the company of a creature not subject to time's decay—or, if it is, one that will always renew itself with each season and generation.

Of course the portrait lacks individuality. The whole “Knight's Tale” lacks individuality, for it is less concerned with real people than with the ideas and ideals by which people live in a real world, one which often seems devoid of purpose or significance. Emily is one of the ideas that make this world tolerable, and if she were given a personality, she would lose her symbolic significance as the goal toward which the better side of chivalry aspires. Within the tale she is scarcely permitted to act; she merely reacts to the incidents of the plot in a way which the Knight evidently considers ideally feminine, praying Theseus to spare the young knights' lives when they are found fighting in the wood, asking Diana to let her remain a maiden and then adapting herself becomingly to the prospect of marriage with Arcite, lamenting his untimely death, and finally living happily ever after with Palamon. She has no mind or character of her own, desiring only what most desires her, fulfilling in almost total passivity the symbolic function assigned to her in the Knight's initial description. Virtually untouched by the grim realities of the story, she gives recompense for them and makes the chivalric ideal come true, at least for Palamon and the reader. When Palamon first saw her he mistook her for a goddess; but I’m not sure that Arcite was not even more mistaken in supposing that she was a woman. She deceived them both, for she was only an idea, though one of more importance to the ideal of chivalry than a real woman could have been.

From Emily in her eternal May let us move to the heroine of the “Merchant's Tale,” whose deceptiveness begins with the fact that she bears the name of Emily's month. We first meet May in the night-time fantasies of the old lecher January, through whom we are to make whatever emotional investment we care to make in her:

And when that he was in his bed ybrought,
He portrayde in his herte and in his thought
Hir fresshe beautee and hir age tendre,
Hir middel smal, hir armes longe and sclendre,
Hir wise governance, hir gentilesse,
Hir wommanly bering and hir sadnesse.

(E1599-1604)

With the easy self-deception of the romantic libertine, January first pictures to himself her physical charms, and then, as if by inference from these, her fine moral qualities: the boy's brain that accompanies his colt's tooth makes the Platonic assumption that May is all-of-a-piece, the passive exponent of her own loveliness, so that fresh beauty, tender age, small waist, and long slender arms necessarily imply wise behaviour, gentility, true femininity, and constancy. The reader himself is not permitted to see May until the wedding feast is being served:

Mayus, that sit with so benigne a cheere
Hire to biholde it seemed faïrye—
Queene Ester looked nevere with swich an yë
On Assuer, so meeke a look hath she—
I may you nat devise al hir beautee,
But thus muche of hir beautee telle I may,
That she was lik the brighte morwe of May,
Fulfild of alle beautee and plesaunce.

(E1742-9)

On first sight—or perhaps to only ‘a moderately attentive ear’—this passage seems not unlike the description of Emily: something about a beautiful woman and a May morning and a narrator hard put to it to describe such beauty. But Chaucer in his own devious way is playing quite honestly with us, for beneath the seemingly simple description of a romance heroine there runs a disturbing undercurrent. The two specific qualities of character that May's appearance suggests—benignity and meekness—are initially pleasing, but as one dwells on them in their emphatic isolation, they must appear to be too good to be true, for they are the very qualities that a woman would need in full measure in order to serve as bride to January, who is evidently destined to have no such luck. The beauty of Emily was unmixed with any traits of character, nor was she likened to another woman. But May's is the meekness of Queen Esther, whose charm was sufficient to accomplish the deaths of Haman, his ten sons, and tens of thousands of other souls. Even that haunting line, ‘Hire to biholde it seemed faïrye’, invokes a sense of illusion—or delusion—and to the medieval reader probably invoked a sense of something disquieting. Finally, the narrator seems more than conventionally baffled in his attempt to describe May. May is the grammatical as well as the topical subject of the passage, but there is no verb to go with her: the narrator is distracted into anacoluthon.3 In similar grammatical circumstances Emily had threatened to escape from the Knight, but he caught her again by taking a by-path through the May flowers, which he thus made part of her. The Merchant, however, breaks off as if wholly frustrated. The last four lines of an eight-line passage of description consist of an acknowledgement of his failure adequately to depict May's beauty. Instead of depicting it, he uses the word ‘beauty’ itself in three of his four lines, and escapes from his cul-de-sac only by way of an arid double pun, rhyming the verb may with the month May in order to describe the woman May.

I should not wish further to infuriate Professor Bronson by suggesting that in this pun the verb may, while expressing grammatical potentiality, also suggests May's potentiality to be other than what her beauty might imply. Nevertheless, the effect of the whole passage is surely to suggest such potentiality, and the narrator's elaborate clumsiness must make a careful reader feel that there is something impenetrable about May's loveliness, a cool hardness that puts one off. One senses, moreover, no real enthusiasm in the description, almost, indeed, a kind of reluctance on the narrator's part to explore this woman's mystery. We may well suspect that what appears in her face to be the romance heroine's passivity is actually a latent potentiality for stealthy action. The suspicion that May has a shrewd mind of her own, though it is confirmed only late in the poem, is intermittently aroused in the reader during the intervening action. Thus while describing the morning after the bridal night the Merchant intrudes on the scene to say:

But God woot what that May thoughte in hir herte
Whan she him saw up sitting in his sherte,
In his night-cappe and with his nekke lene—
She praiseth nat his playing worth a bene.

(E1851-4)

The last line is a splendid example of how in Chaucer the straight may become crooked. Strictly speaking, since the Merchant does not know what May thought—only God knows—her failure to praise January must be taken as negative narrative action: she did not speak praise of him, and yet, since she is not said to have spoken at all, she did not speak dispraise of him. On the other hand, the Merchant, by saying that she did not praise his playing worth a bean, that is, by seeming to use the very words with which May did not speak, has either contradicted his earlier disclaimer of knowledge or has foisted upon her his own thought. Of course the reader reading quickly what seem to be easily understood lines will not pause to make this awkward analysis, and will probably conclude that May's meekness and benignity have begun to give way when put to the test of January's love-making. But he will be wrong, for in his own devious way Chaucer is being careful to preserve, in letter if not in spirit, the fiction of the romance heroine's passivity until the last possible moment, while, of course, simultaneously suggesting to us that it is a fiction. The portrait of May is thus a curious combination of superficial honesty and subcutaneous deceit, taking its form from the woman it is describing.

Critics have sometimes noticed a similarity between May and Criseide, and I suppose they are right, although I resent their doing so because I remain as enchanted by Criseide as I am unenchanted by May. Yet Chaucer's descriptions of the two women do share something of the same technique, for since in both cases the women themselves will be ultimately revealed as untrue to what their beauty implies to the romantic beholder, in both cases the poet's honesty allows for this development from the very beginning. But Criseide, who has the larger function of destroying a truly romantic vision of life—not the falsely romantic, selfish one that May destroys—is handled with the most loving care, as befits so unusually charming a woman. In Book I the narrator makes three separate attempts to describe her, with the second and third perhaps suggesting his consciousness of having failed to do the job adequately in the first and second—although they also suggest the magnitude of his own emotional involvement. Here is the first description, which follows the summary of the Trojan war and of Calchas's treachery to his city and his daughter:

Criseide was this lady name aright:
As to my doom, in al Troyes citee
Nas noon so fair, for passing every wight,
So angelik was hir natif beautee,
That like a thing immortal seemed she,
As dooth an hevenissh parfit creature
That down were sent in scorning of nature.

(TC I.99-105)

One wonders whether the narrator may not, in this first attempt, have been working extraordinarily hard in order to counter the Biblical saying that nothing but bad fruit will come from a bad tree, a treacherous daughter from a treasonable father; for here the vocabulary is more ornate than in most of Chaucer's descriptions of women. Yet it is also highly conventional, and certainly not difficult to understand. Indeed, one might complain that the sense of the stanza lags behind its vocabulary: what the narrator has succeeded in saying is that Criseide was this lady's name aright (the word aright is one of those pedantic emphases by which Chaucer constantly reminds the reader that his style is easy),4 and further, that in his opinion, there was none so fair in the whole city of Troy (and one wonders how he got to a Troy that was sacked several thousand years ago), because her natural beauty surpassed everyone's, being so angelic (or angel-like) that she seemed like an immortal thing (i.e., an angel), as does a heavenish perfect creature (i.e., an angel), of the kind that might be sent down in scorn of Nature (i.e., her natural beauty was so great that it was supernatural). In general, there seems to be no doubt about it: Criseide is as beautiful as an angel, and we romantic-minded men may expect that she will show a heroine's integrity: her role will be to reflect her beauty in her personality, naturally if rather inertly pleasing us. But we really know no more about her than if she were a complete mystery to the poet himself.

Seventy lines later, Criseide goes to the temple to attend the Feast of the Palladion, and the narrator tries to describe her again:

Among thise othere folk was Criseida,
In widwes habit blak, but nathelees,
Right as oure firste lettre is now an A,
In beautee first so stood she makelees:
Hir goodly looking gladed al the prees.
Nas nevere yit seen thing to been praised derre,
Nor under cloude blak so bright a sterre,
As was Criseide, as folk saide everichone
That hire biheelden in hir blake weede.

(I.169-77)

Notice how the narrator invokes the opinion of contemporary Trojans in support of what he is saying about Criseide. This is a device he often uses, sometimes rather irritably, when he seems to fear that readers, knowing the outcome, will not wholly share his enthusiasm for his heroine—not wholly believe in her seeming excellence. It is possible that the effect here will be the opposite of what seems intended—that some readers may be made to experience some doubt, not perhaps about Criseide's beauty, but about its implications. In any case, the narrator has not described a knowable woman: while she shines out from her black clothing like a star from behind a black cloud, Criseide has not yet left the skies to put on earthiness. The description continues:

And yit she stood ful lowe and stille allone,
Bihinden othere folk, in litel brede,
And neigh the dore, ay under shames drede:
Simple of attir and debonaire of cheere—

a timid, mild, meek angel obviously out of place in the ambiguous position on earth she has been left in by her mortal father. All this is highly conventional, highly romantic in the easiest sense of the word: a fair damsel in distress. But the stanza ends:

                                         … and debonaire of cheere,
With ful assured looking and manere.

So unexpected is this last line that one is tempted to split it off from Criseide and apply it to the still confident Troilus, who appears as the subject of the next sentence, leading his companions up and down in the temple and making fun of love. Such a division would be grammatically and textually possible, but it would be wrong. For Criseide has finally made the trip from heaven to earth, almost without the narrator's having noticed it: standing full lowly, still, alone, behind other folk, a little apart, near the door, under shame's dread, simple of attire, mild of face—with look and manner full assured. If ever a line cried for expatiation, it is this one, but the narrator, as if caught up by the narrative action, turns straight to Troilus. Yet the unexpected juxtaposition lingers in the mind for a moment, at once charming and remotely disquieting, for we do not understand how so conventionally timid a creature comes to possess such sudden self-assurance. By learning more about Criseide we know less: detail increases her mystery not our knowledge of her. But if we hurry on with the narrator we will soon forget any uneasiness that may have arisen in us, submerging it in the delight we receive from the whole portrait.

Ninety-eight lines later there occurs the third portrait of Criseide. Having finally accepted the fact that she is a woman, the narrator describes her as such:

She nas nat with the leeste of hir stature,
But alle hir limes so wel answeringe
Weren to wommanhood, that creature
Was nevere lasse mannish in seeminge;
And eek the pure wise of hir mevinge
Shewed wel that men mighte in hir gesse
Honour, estaat, and wommanly noblesse.

(I.281-7)

If one reads the stanza quickly, one is almost certain to get the impression that what Chaucer has said is that Criseide's appearance proved that she had admirable qualities of character, which any one who looked at her could see. But if one reads carefully, one will find that the poet has proceeded with remarkable caution, and has, indeed, told us nothing more about Criseide than that, being a very beautiful woman, she was attractive to men. She was not the smallest of women (which does not mean that she was the tallest, or even that she was tall), but all her limbs so well answered to womanhood that no creature could have seemed less masculine—that is, she looked entirely female. And the very way she moved showed well that men might guess there to be in her honour, estate, and womanly noblesse. This last sentence is another fine example of how to achieve honesty by deceit: one can hardly help reading it to mean that the way she moved proved that she had womanly noblesse; but in fact it means that the way she moved looked so well that, as a result, men might guess she had it. In other words, the readily understandable sense is not the same as the grammatical sense. Chaucer the poet has further enhanced Criseide's charm, but Chaucer the grammarian has been careful to draw no inferences from it. Caveat spectator—in this case, both Troilus and the romantic reader.

Once again the description is amplified, and modified, by the narrative action. The next stanza continues:

To Troilus right wonder wel withalle
Gan for to like hir meving and hir cheere,
Which somdeel deinous was, for she leet falle
Hir look a lite aside in swich manere
Ascances, ‘What, may I nat stonden here?’
And after that hir looking gan she lighte,
That nevere thoughte him seen so good a sighte.

Once again that tantalizing self-assurance, momentarily disquieting, ultimately enhancing her mystery and charm. On most masculine readers, as on Troilus and the narrator, the effect of this lovely meek woman whose look can be a challenge will be devastating. We will not worry about how she goes about the business of ‘lighting her looking’, since such a woman can obviously do anything to please. So charmed are we that we readily forget that we still know nothing about her except that she is charming.

It would be a gross oversimplification to say that the rest of the poem consists of a gradual discovery on everyone's part that Criseide is, while altogether charming, little else, ‘matter too soft a lasting mark to bear’. But it would not be too misleading to say that it is one of the qualities that the romanticist imputes to her on first sight that helps betray her: her passivity, which insures that she will behave in such a way as to please the on-looker, and desire what most desires her. But the onlooker must be physically present to look on her and to desire her: separated from Troilus, she is desirable in Diomede's eyes, to whom she resolves that she ‘wol be trewe’. It is interesting that the narrator, ultimately forced to face the actuality of Criseide's infidelity to Troilus, tries to understand it by looking upon her once more, in a final description of her. This occurs in the well-known passage in Book V that has as its source the earliest of all descriptions of Criseide, the one given in Dares of Crete (though Chaucer knew it through Joseph of Exeter). In Chaucer's poem, Diomede has been urging himself on Criseide in the Greek camp, hardly believing that even his experienced technique will win her. The narrator breaks off the story for a moment to describe Diomede, and then moves on to Criseide:

Criseide mene was of hir stature,
Therto of shap, of face, and eek of cheere,
Ther mighte been no fairer creature;
And ofte times this was hir manere:
To goon ytressed with hir heres clere
Down by hir coler at hir bak bihinde,
Which with a threed of gold she wolde binde;
And, save hir browes joineden yfere,
Ther nas no lak in ought I can espyen.

(V.806-14)

While there are a number of echoes of the descriptions in Book I, the romantic excitement has gone, replaced by a kind of puzzled melancholy, as though the narrator were painfully going over what he had said before in order to find out what had gone wrong. Reviewing the topic, he picks up petty details not mentioned before: her medium stature, which earlier had been vaguely described as not the smallest; a not very remarkable coiffure, which occupies four lines; joined eyebrows, the only fault he can see—notice the curious nostalgia that arises from his still being able to see a woman whom he had never known and who had, indeed, died thousands of years before he was born. And once again he reinforces his own opinion with the testimony of others:

But for to speken of hir yën clere,
Lo, trewely, they writen that hire sien
That Paradis stood formed in hir yën;
And with hir riche beautee everemore
Stroof love in hire ay which of hem was more.

These lines show a sudden powerful surge back toward the initial vision that has been frustrated—the vision of Paradise in a woman's eyes, a land of lush beauty and of high passion. Like the old men on the walls of Troy watching Helen pass, the narrator is suddenly requickened, and he seems on the point of trying to restore to the poem the rich romantic values it once had. But reillusionment is not possible, and he continues with his sad examination of the facts:

She sobre was, eek simple and wis withal,
The beste ynorisshed eek that mighte be,
And goodly of hir speeche in general;
Charitable, estaatlich, lusty, free,
Ne nevere mo ne lakked hire pitee:
Tendre-herted, sliding of corage—
But trewely I can nat telle hir age.

The style of this stanza is wholly different from anything we have encountered before in the ground covered by this paper. It is, indeed, closer to the style of the portraits in the “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, and Chaucer is in a very real sense presenting us with a person we have hardly known before: we thought we knew her, but we didn’t. Like some of the portraits in the “General Prologue” the passage concludes with an anticlimax—indeed, a double anticlimax. After all those admirable attributes, so natural to a woman with a kind, tender, and responsive heart, the simple fact that Criseide was ‘sliding of corage’, that her heart was unstable, comes as the unemphatic explanation of everything that has occurred in the sad dénouement of the poem—a highly simplified explanation, to be sure, but one whose logical force is irresistible; in its limited way, it is true and honest. Yet Chaucer here, as often elsewhere, gives an explanation for his poem that will satisfy our reasoning faculties because of its perfect suitability to the facts of the plot, but will leave our imaginations floundering in anticlimax, with most of our questions unanswered. It is true that we have never known Criseide; but most readers will prefer to continue not to know her rather than accept simple instability of heart as the key that unlocks her mystery. And the narrator himself finishes the portrait by invoking the unknown in his last line and second anticlimax: for ‘trewely’ he ‘can nat telle hir age’. All that is certain is that this immortal-seeming creature was most subject to time and to change, and that her mutability is indeed the sole reason for her immortality.

From Criseide to the Prioress is an easy transition suggested by the similarity of phrases in the last stanza quoted to phrases in the portrait of the Prioress.5 But the narrator of Troilus had described a heroine of romance whose conventional romance qualities did not enable her to endure the tests imposed by the real world. The narrator of the General Prologue, on the other hand, is trying to describe a nun who, in the real world, is better fitted to be a romance heroine. And even more than in Troilus, the tension (to use a somewhat weary critical term) between what is and what is expected exists primarily in the mind of the beholder. The portrait of the Prioress is the fourth of the series in the General Prologue, following those of Knight, Squire, and Yeoman. From the time the Knight first began to ride out, he loved chivalry—that is, from the time that he first became a knight he loved being a knight—and all his traits of character are interchangeable with those of an ideal knight. So it is also, on a less exalted scale, with the Squire and the Yeoman. After three such perfect examples of congruency between the person described and his profession, both the reader and the narrator may well expect more of the same. And the description starts promisingly enough:

Ther was also a Nonne, a Prioresse—

(A118)

a statement that names the lady's profession twice, raising her nunliness to a higher mathematical power, as it were. One would not be surprised if the next line were to read:

Devout she was, and loved holinesse—

if, that is, the portrait had begun on the odd line. But the portrait begins on the even line, and it is the next line that is odd:

That of hir smiling was ful simple and coy.

It is easy to ignore how very odd this line is, for it follows with such plausible simplicity upon its predecessor, as if the first thing any one would want to know about a nun would naturally be the quality of her smiling—and after that, of course, the manner of her swearing:

Hir gretteste ooth was but by sainte Loy.

And so the portrait continues, as if the narrator were happy that for once in his life he has met a real-life romance heroine. But the old deception is inevitably present because, of course, she is a nun. Yet this incongruity is less a part of her consciousness than of the narrator's—until that is, he succeeds in exorcising it. Mindful of her profession, he manages to work in a reference to the divine service, if only to emphasize the aesthetic aspects of her rendition of it. But thereafter, charmed by the woman, he gets down to the really basic stuff of her table manners, and after five lines of graceful eating achieves what is apparently a terminal generalization on this aspect of the Prioress:

In curteisye was set ful muchel hir lest.

But the Lord Chesterfield in him has been too strongly stimulated by her dining-table elegance, and he turns from generalization back to specifics in order to make it clear that she drank every bit as daintily as she ate. Only then is he free once more to describe her in general terms, using some of the same ones that we have seen applied to Criseide. Then, in the twenty-fifth line of a forty-five line portrait, the awareness that he is talking about a nun returns to halt his descriptive progress with a sudden jerk:

But, for to speken of hir conscience,
She was so charitable and so pitous—.

But if he had thought to get her back to the convent's chapel-door with the high-Christian ideas of conscience, charity, and pity, he was mistaken, for she has gone off on her own way again, feeling sorry for mice and spoiling small dogs. And so, with one last defiant assertion that at once affirms and dismisses her religious side,

And al was conscience and tendre herte,

he turns, with obvious relief, to what both she and he are more interested in, her perfectly delightful appearance. Amor vincit omnia.

In discussing these portraits of four women I have tried to show some of the ways in which Chaucer can create complexity with his basically simple style—or rather, with a style that might better be called deceptively simple. In all four women there is an element of deception built into their descriptions. Emily is presumably a woman, but emerges from her description as the symbol of what may make the ideal of chivalry worthwhile. May seems the lovely meek victim of senile lust, but her potentiality for relieving her predicament in the most ruthless way is implicit in her description. Criseide, most charming of women, is candidly described as an ideal heroine of romance whose mystery the reader is encouraged, but not forced, to explore in search of qualities as fair as her own person is, only to find that in the end the mystery remains, and the qualities are, at best, insufficient. And finally the Prioress, whom the narrator tries to describe as a religious but ends up by describing, in all delighted honesty, as a romance heroine, thereby accomplishing, without using one satiric word, a double satire, on himself as a man as well as on her as a nun.

Although the Prioress herself is not really a complex woman, her portrait is surely one of the most complex brief portraits in English literature. Moreover, it concludes with a touch that seems to me representative of Chaucerian simplicity at its most diabolical. You will recall that after the narrator has finished his actual description, he adds the couplet,

Another Nonne with hire hadde she
That was hir chapelaine, and preestes three.

(A163-4)

Stylistically speaking, there isn’t a simpler sentence in Chaucer, a plain statement of plain fact. Yet although the couplet appears in all complete manuscripts—and the second line is one of those great rarities in the Canterbury Tales, a line with no manuscript variations—scholars as far back as Tyrwhitt have often questioned the authenticity of those three priests.6 Perhaps the principal stated objection to them is that they contradict another plain statement of fact, that there were twenty-nine pilgrims, for three priests would make at least thirty-one; and of course two of them never show up again in the Canterbury Tales. But one suspects that scholarly doubt about the priests is not uninfluenced by a certain gentlemanly impulse to save the Prioress's reputation: and one can point out, as Manly did, that the Convent of St Leonard's in Stratford-atte-Bowe (to which scholars, repairing Chaucer's omission, have assigned her) was too small to allow its Prioress three priests on her journeyings.7 Thus the majority of Chaucer's recent editors have agreed in assigning the priests to a curious limbo: they appear clearly in the text, but are rendered non-existent by the notes.8 Now you see them, now you don’t. In order to kill off Partridge, Swift turned both himself and Partridge into fictions; but one feels that the scholars, overcome by the charming verisimilitude of the portrait of the Prioress, have in their own real persons turned her fictional priests into real priests in order to prove that they have no fictional existence.

Fortunately there have been those who uphold the right of the three priests to remain in the text, notably Professors Sherbo and Hamilton.9 And Mrs Hamilton has re-emphasized Skeat's important point that Chaucer's nine-and-twenty is not the exact number it is often taken to be.10 Chaucer did, indeed, avoid using thirty, a round number which generally means in Middle and Modern English about thirty; but having chosen the utterly specific number twenty-nine, Chaucer then made it unspecific again by writing ‘wel nine and twenty’, which means ‘fully’ or ‘at least’ but not ‘exactly’ twenty-nine. This is a microcosm of his style: he gets credit for being an honest, straightforward, clearheaded narrator, while allowing himself a dishonest leeway of one, or two, or three: an honest russet number is made dishonest by its kersey modifier.

So much for Chaucer's reputation for honest dealing. But what about the lady's? Should the only fictional Prioress that St Leonard's ever enjoyed be going to Canterbury in the company of three priests? Surely not. Yet, like all the attractive women we have been examining, she is a romance heroine, and a most attractive one at that; and, as we have seen, the reaction of men to a romance heroine is a part of her character. I’m afraid that the three priests are a part of the Prioress's character, and while it may be courteous of scholars to try to relieve her of moral responsibility for them, it is untrue to that simple, trustworthy narrator, Geoffrey Chaucer. I’m sure he enjoyed awarding his creation such company, and I hope she is properly grateful to her creator. In any case, I am happy to think that even after five and a half centuries the Prioress is continuing her journey to Canterbury in the company of her three priests, probably making a fool of herself, but surely capable, like other attractive women, of making even bigger fools of us male critics.

Notes

  1. B. H. Bronson, In Search of Chaucer (Toronto, 1960), p. 10.

  2. Such terms as persona in their application to Chaucer … are roundly castigated by Professor Bronson on pp. 25-9.

  3. Robinson succeeds in avoiding the anacoluthon by putting a full stop after the second line; he thus makes a main clause out of what I take to be a consecutive clause dependent on a relative clause (that sit … cheere). Robinson's text would presumably be translated, ‘To behold May, who sits with so benign a look, seemed magic’.

  4. Both Robinson and R. K. Root in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (Princeton, 1926) prefer the even more pedantic variant al right.

  5. See, e.g., A. C. Cawley, ‘A Note on Chaucer's Prioress and Criseyde’, MLR, xliii (1948), 74-7.

  6. Thomas Tyrwhitt, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer (London, 1775-8), i, ‘Introductory Discourse’. See also J. M. Manly ed., Canterbury Tales (New York, 1928), pp. 507-8; Manly-Rickert, ii, 95, and iii, 422-3; Robinson, p. 655; and A. C. Baugh, ed. Chaucer's Major Poetry (New York, 1963), p. 241.

  7. See Manly's 1928 edition, p. 508.

  8. An exception is Robert A. Pratt, ed., Selections from the Tales of Canterbury and Short Poems (Boston, 1966) who omits the words ‘and preestes three’ from A164, leaving the line incomplete.

  9. Arthur Sherbo, ‘Chaucer's Nun's Priest Again’, PMLA, lxiv (1949), 236-46; Marie P. Hamilton, ‘The Convent of Chaucer's Prioress and Her Priests', Philologica: The Malone Anniversary Studies, ed. T. A. Kirby and H. B. Woolf (Baltimore, 1949), pp. 179-90.

  10. Philologica, p. 182; W. W. Skeat's multivolumed Oxford Chaucer (1894), v, 19.

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